The Age of Reformation
The Age of Reformation charts how religion, politics and social change were always intimately interlinked in the sixteenth century, from the murderous politics of the Tudor court to the building and fragmentation of new religious and social identities in the parishes.
In this book, Alec Ryrie provides an authoritative overview of the religious and political reformations of the sixteenth century. This turbulent century saw Protestantism come to England, Scotland and even Ireland, while the Tudor and Stewart monarchs made their authority felt within and beyond their kingdoms more than any of their predecessors. This book demonstrates how this age of reformations produced not only a new religion, but a new politics absolutist, yet pluralist, populist yet bound by law.
This new edition has been fully revised and updated and includes expanded sections on Lollardy and anticlericalism, on Henry VIIIs early religious views, on several of the rebellions which convulsed Tudor England and on unofficial religion, ranging from Elizabethan Catholicism to incipient atheism.
Drawing on the most recent research, Alec Ryrie explains why these events took the course they did and why that course was so often an unexpected and unlikely one. It is essential reading for students of early modern British history and the history of the reformation.
Alec Ryrie is Professor of the History of Christianity at Durham University. His previous publications include Protestants (2017), Being Protestant in Reformation Britain (2013), The Sorcerers Tale (2008), The Origins of the Scottish Reformation (2006) and The Gospel and Henry VIII (2003).
Religion, Politics and Society in Britain
Series editor: Keith Robbins
The Conversion of Britain
Religion, Politics and Society in Britain, 600800
Barbara Yorke
The Age of Reformation
The Tudor and Stewart Realms 14851603
Alec Ryrie
The Post-Reformation
Religion, Politics and Society in Britain, 16031714
John Spurr
Eighteenth-Century Britain
Religion and Politics, 17141815
Nigel Yates
Providence and Empire
Religion, Politics and Society in the United Kingdom, 18151914
Stewart Brown
Religion and Society in Twentieth-Century Britain
Callum G. Brown
Religion, Politics and Society in Britain, 10661272
Henry Mayr-Harting
Religion, Politics and Society in Britain 8001066
A.E. Redgate
The Age of Reformation
The Tudor and Stewart Realms 14851603
Second edition
Alec Ryrie
Second edition published 2017
by Routledge
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2017 Alec Ryrie
The right of Alec Ryrie to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
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First edition published by Pearson Education 2008
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ISBN: 978-1-138-78463-5 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-138-78464-2 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-315-27214-6 (ebk)
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For my students
Contents
No understanding of British history is possible without grappling with the relationship between religion, politics and society. How that should be done, however, is another matter. Historians of religion, who have frequently thought of themselves as ecclesiastical historians, have had one set of preoccupations. Political historians have had another. They have acknowledged, however, that both religion and politics can only be understood, in any given period, in a social context. This series makes the interplay between religion, politics and society its preoccupation. Even so, it does not assume that what is entailed by religion and politics remains the same throughout, to be considered as a constant in separate volumes merely because of the passage of time.
In its completed form the series will have probed the nature of these links from c.600 to the present day and offered a perspective, over such a long period, that has not before been attempted in a systematic fashion. There is, however, no straitjacket that requires individual authors to adhere to a common understanding of what such an undertaking involves. Even if there could be a general agreement about concepts, that is to say about what religion is or how politics can be identified, the social context of such categorisations is not static. The spheres notionally allocated to the one or to the other alter with circumstances. Sometimes it might appear that they cannot be separated. Sometimes it might appear that they sharply conflict. Each period under review will have its defining characteristics in this regard.
It is the Christian religion, in its manifold institutional manifestations, with which authors are overwhelmingly concerned since it is with conversion that the series begins. It ends, however, with a volume in which Christianity exists alongside other world religions but in a society frequently perceived to be secular. Yet what de-Christianisation is taken to be depends upon what Christianisation has been taken to be. There is, therefore, a relationship between topics that are tackled in the first volume, and those considered in the last, which might at first sight seem unlikely. In between, of course are the Christian Centuries which, despite their label, are no less full of boundary disputes, both before and after the Reformation. The perspective of the series, additionally, is broadly pan-insular. The Britain of 600 is plainly not the Britain of the early twenty-first century. However, the current political structures of Britain-Ireland have arguably owed as much to religion as to politics. Christendom has been inherently ambiguous.
It would be surprising if readers, not to mention authors, understood the totality of the picture that is presented in the same way. What is common, however, is a realisation that the narrative of religion, politics and society in Britain is not a simple tale that points in a single direction but rather one of enduring and by no means exhausted complexity.
Keith Robbins, November 2005
Revisiting this book eight years after completing it, I am relieved to find that I still broadly agree with the arguments made in the first edition. In places, however, fresh research has meant that I have had additional nuances to add or errors to correct. In other places, I have adjusted my own ideas; in others still, I now realise I made embarrassingly crass mistakes.
